Journeys

Jan Morris

Published by Oxford University Press, softcover

She has been called 'the Flaubert of the jet age' by Alistair Cooke, 'a champion' by James Michener, and 'perhaps the best descriptive writer of our times' by Rebecca West. Certainly, in her ability to capture both the surface and essence of a place, Jan Morris is without peer among contemporary travel writers.

Journeys, her latest book of collected travel essays, takes us to a succession of strikingly diverse locales, some far away and exotic, some more familiar. Everywhere her eye for detail
remains as vivid, her feeling for local character as sensitive, whether she visits Texas, that 'separate cosmos, spinning to another rhythm' or Miami, 'one of the most explosively vital, profitable, magnetic and repellent places on the face of the earth', the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay or a ramshackle waterfront in Calcutta. She is no less fascinated by Sydney, 'one of the most beautiful cities in the world',
than by the welcoming but enigmatic Shang-Hai, and her journeys closer to home are related with the same elegance and wit, from Sweden to Yugoslavia, and from Aberdeen ('handsome, civilized, diligent, granite') to Wells, Somerset, home of Anthony Trollope.